by LENA DIAZ,
“Okay, I give,” she said. “What do you have that’s better?”
He motioned toward the sky. “A helicopter.”
Sure enough, the enormous chopper they’d been waiting for was coming in for a landing. It was surprisingly quiet, which Austin had already told them to expect because it had a stealth mode. How he had access to a multimillion-dollar military-grade helicopter she’d prefer not to know.
“Remember,” Bailey yelled to be heard over the sound of the wind generated by the rotors. “Whoever reaches the hostages first, find out whether Sebastian and Amber are with them or if anyone knows where they are.”
They all nodded.
“Good luck,” Austin yelled to the group.
Jace clapped Austin on the back in a “bro” hug, surprising Bailey. The two argued, a lot, and traded insults all the time. Who knew they were actually friends?
“Come on,” Jace said, waving them forward as he headed toward the chopper.
“In a minute,” Bailey said, grabbing Kade’s hand to hold him back.
She waited until all the others had hopped onboard. Finally, when there were no more excuses to wait any longer, she blew out a shaky breath. “If I fall to my death, don’t cremate me,” she yelled to be heard. “I’m afraid of fire.”
“You’re not going to fall to your death.”
“Promise me. No cremation.”
He gave her a quick, hard kiss. “I promise. Come on. Let’s go before someone sees or hears the chopper and we lose the element of surprise.”
She ran with him and he lifted her inside, then climbed in behind her. As soon as he cleared the doorway, the chopper lifted off.
Bailey fell back toward the opening but Kade grabbed her, steadying her.
She swallowed hard, looking down at the ground rushing past them, and at Austin who was rapidly becoming a speck on the horizon.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.
“Can you wait until we’re on the roof?” Kade teased, as he clipped some kind of lead to her harness.
The other end was suspended from a bar on the helicopter. He quickly attached the belts and pulleys to her harness, just like the others were doing, except that none of them appeared to need help like she did.
“Has everyone done this before except me?” she called out.
As one, they all nodded.
She cursed beneath her breath.
Kade gave one last tug on her gear and then went to work on his own.
“Put your gloves on,” he reminded her.
She dug them out of her pockets and pulled them on.
Kade put his own gloves on, then performed one last inspection of her equipment, nodding his approval.
“It’s a go,” Mason called out from his position in the open doorway. And then, he was gone, leaping out into thin air.
Bailey clutched Kade as Devlin moved to the opening.
“We’re there already?” she squeaked.
“We’re there. Come on. This will be no different than what we practiced on the balcony at Mason’s house today.”
Devlin leaped from the opening and was gone.
“Oh my God,” Bailey said.
“Are you afraid of heights?” Kade demanded.
“I’m afraid of landing!”
His eyes filled with pity. “The plane. I should have thought of that. Do you want to stay here?”
“Yes!”
“Okay. The pilot will take you back to—”
“No! I want to stay. But I’m not going to. I’ll do it. I just don’t want to.”
Another Enforcer, one of many that they’d gathered together this morning to help them with the assault, jumped out of the chopper.
All too soon, the only ones left were Kade and her.
He tugged her toward the opening.
“Wait,” she said. “I’m not sure I can do this. Rappelling from a balcony is one thing. There was a pool to fall in if I screwed up. If I screw this up, I fall off the top of a building.”
Click. Click.
She looked down to see what had made the noise. A short length of cable with two carabiners connected Kade’s harness to hers. She was snugged up against him, chest to chest.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
He leaned down and whispered in her ear. “Taking care of you.”
And then he leaped out of the helicopter, pulling her with him.
She would have screamed, but the terrifying fall stole her breath. And then, they were landing on the roof of EXIT Inc., as gently as if they’d bounced on a trampoline, because Kade had taken the brunt of the landing, lifting her up so that she didn’t feel the full force of rappelling onto the roof. How he did it with his bad leg, she didn’t know. Now it was probably hurting again, because of her.
With practiced ease, he disconnected their equipment and waved to the pilot. Soon the chopper was a dark dot against the sky as the pilot returned to whatever airfield Austin had bribed him to come from.
Kade dropped the harnesses and ropes on the roof and pulled his gun out. “Ready?”
She pulled her Sig Sauer out. “Ready.”
Jace passed her and Kade, leaving Bailey to close the door. She gently pulled it shut so that it wouldn’t echo through the stairwell. Their little army might be small, but if things worked out as planned and they disabled the security systems from the inside, Mason had lined up a score more men and women to breach the building from the outside. It was a good plan, as plans went. But there were a host of unknowns that elevated the risk to extraordinary levels. The riskiest part being that Mason and Devlin only had one full day to perform reconnaissance.
Normally a mission like this required weeks of surveillance, so they could be sure how many enemy combatants they had to deal with and what weapons were at their disposal. But with potential hostages down in the tunnels who could be killed at any moment, they were taking more risks than usual. And Mason believed the manpower losses at the caves meant that Faegan was operating with a skeleton crew.
The Asheville building was smaller than the one in Boulder. There were only three floors, and the executive offices were on the first level. Security was too tight to approach the building from the ground, thus Austin’s genius suggestion to rappel from the helicopter onto the roof. Sure enough, they’d encountered no alarms and no security forces so far.
They’d decided the best approach would be to sneak into the security offices on the first floor to disable the alarm and hopefully take out a few guards while they were there. So the team split at the first landing, with Devlin, Mason, and two of the other Enforcers heading down the stairwell to the ground floor.
The remaining six of them stood ready to clear the third floor, believing that it would be empty since the sun was going down soon and the parking lot only had a handful of cars left. Even Faegan and his men had to keep some kind of work hours. And since they wouldn’t expect an assault here, hundreds of miles from the caves in Colorado, the only people left in the building should be Faegan and whoever he considered to be his most critical support staff. Kade was betting that Faegan would keep the same habits he’d always kept in the past, of working well past sunset every night. The man was committed to his cause.
Jace held up a hand to ensure silence, then slowly pulled the door open and peeked through the slit. He gave them a thumbs-up, then yanked the door all the way open and motioned for them to hurry through. As if they’d been a team for years, they worked perfectly in tandem, clearing one room at a time before moving to the next. In little time at all, they’d confirmed the entire floor was empty.
Two more floors to go. Then they could hit the tunnels.
They raced to the bank of elevators to secure them. They flanked them on either side while Kade pressed the button. A few seconds later, a small chime announced the elevator’s arrival.
Bailey’s finger tensed on the frame of her gun as she waited for the doors to open. Swoosh. She crouched down and aimed her pistol
into the opening. Empty. Jumping back out of the way, she waited while Kade used a special fireman’s key to lock the elevator and prevent it from returning to one of the lower floors.
He pressed the button to call the second elevator and they repeated the same procedure. Second elevator empty, locked. So far, everything was going exactly as planned.
Jace pressed a button on the earpiece that he was wearing. “Sitrep,” he whispered.
Bailey stood beside Kade, waiting for the update. Jace nodded and gave them a thumbs-up sign.
“Alarm’s disabled,” he whispered. “After we clear the second floor, we’ll signal them and they’ll open the doors for the rest of the team to begin the assault on the primary target.” He signaled the rest of the team, and the Enforcers with them led the way, running toward the stairwell. Jace, Kade, and Bailey took up the rear and soon they were all at the landing, ready to begin clearing the next floor.
Guns at the ready, they plastered themselves against the wall while, once again, Jace gently pulled the door open a crack to peer inside.
Bam! Bam!
Bullets blasted through the wall, slamming one of the Enforcers into the railing. Bailey lunged for him but he toppled over and was gone, his body thudding sickeningly on the concrete below.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
Jace and the others returned fire through the open door. Kade grabbed Bailey and yanked her out of the line of fire.
Jace made a winding motion with his hand. They ducked down while he laid cover fire, then Kade was out the door, leading the charge. Bailey and the others took up the rear.
Two bodies littered the carpet about twenty feet in, blood pooling beneath them. Bailey knelt down and checked both for a pulse, then shook her head.
“Mercenaries,” she told Kade, pointing to the tattoos on their arms.
He nodded, then yanked her back and laid fire toward a door that had just opened across from them. The gunman in the opening fell soundlessly to the floor without ever firing his weapon.
More gunfire sounded from farther down the hall where Jace and the two other men with him were engaging more of Faegan’s guys. One group was in a set of offices to the left, the other to the right. Even more gunfire sounded from downstairs. Lots of gunfire. Which meant their team outside the building had now joined the battle and was trying to break their way into the ground floor.
“Jace is pinned down,” Kade said. “We need to find a way to get behind the gunmen.”
Bailey looked around, getting her bearings, picturing the blueprints that she’d studied earlier today as part of the prep at Mason’s home. With three floors of layouts to remember, it was hard to separate them and get a clear idea of where they were.
“The conference rooms.” Kade pointed to the door directly across from them. “Didn’t Mason say there was a parallel hall across the back wall that connects all the meeting areas to the offices?”
She studied the door he’d pointed to, noted the room number hanging on the wall. The pictures in her head snapped together and she knew exactly where they were. She counted the doors down to where the gunmen had Jace and the others pinned.
“Through there,” she agreed.
They both looked up and down the hall, then ran for the other side. One of the gunmen spotted them and leaned out into the hallway. Kade jumped in front of Bailey and fired.
The gunman’s arm exploded in a hail of gunfire from both Kade’s and Jace’s directions. The man screamed in pain. Another shot rang out and he dropped to the floor, dead.
Kade threw the door open and Bailey ran inside with him. They rushed to the end of the conference room to the only other door. Kade held up his fingers, counting down . . . three, two, one. He pulled open the door and Bailey squatted down, then lunged into the opening, sweeping her Sig Sauer back and forth.
“Clear,” she whispered.
They headed into the back hallway, which was brightly lit from the rows of windows across the front of the building. The sound of gunfire continued to ring out both from down the hall and below stairs. But they didn’t risk running past any of the rooms without clearing them first. At the next office door to their left, Bailey was the one to count down. On one, she threw the door open and Kade swept his gun inside.
“Hold it,” he yelled. “Drop your weapon. Drop it!” He cursed and squeezed the trigger, the explosion of sound nearly deafening in the confined space.
He straightened and ran into the room, with Bailey following.
Kneeling down, he checked the gunman for a pulse, then shook his head.
“Damned idiot,” he said. “He didn’t have to die.”
Bailey put her hand on his shoulder. “You’re a good man. He obviously didn’t think twice about trying to kill you.”
The look on his face told her she wasn’t making him feel any better. And it highlighted one of the major differences between the two of them. Killing mercenaries who had no loyalties other than to the almighty dollar didn’t even cause a blip on her guilt-o-meter. And yet, every time Kade was forced to shoot one of Faegan’s men she could see him die a little inside. She’d tried not to think about what that said about her. Maybe she really had been doing this job far too long.
“Two more rooms to clear and we’ll be there,” he told her. Then he headed out into the back hallway.
No one else tried to stop them, and they were soon poised at the door where they knew the gunmen were holed up who were trying to kill Jace and his men.
“I wish we knew how many were in there,” Kade whispered. “I’ll go in high, you go in low. Ready?”
She moved her finger from the frame of her gun to the trigger. “Ready.”
Kade slowly and quietly turned the knob. He held up the usual three fingers, then two, then—
The door yanked open before he could push it open.
“Hold it, hold it!” someone yelled.
Kade grabbed Bailey’s gun, shoving her hand up just as she let off a shot. It went wild into the ceiling above them. Then she realized who was in the room.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, horrified. “I almost killed you.”
Jace had gone pale, and wiped a shaky hand across his forehead. “Maybe not, if you’d hit the vest. Still, that was close.”
She squeezed Kade’s hand in thanks, still shaky from her near-miss. Working in teams was definitely not her forte.
Kade and Bailey stepped into the room with Jace. Four gunmen lay dead on the floor. One of the Equalizers who’d been with Jace was currently handcuffing two more gunmen back to back. But both appeared to be unconscious.
The door to the outer hallway was open, and in the hall could be seen another body.
“Oh, no,” Bailey whispered. It was a member of their team who’d been pinned down with Jace.
Jace’s tortured gaze met hers. “He put up a damn good fight. We wouldn’t have been able to charge the room without him, and without you shooting in that back hallway. That distracted them, gave us the window we needed to rush them.” He checked the loading on his gun and popped in a new magazine. “Let’s finish clearing this floor. Sounds to me like most of the action is going on downstairs without us. I haven’t been able to get in touch with Mason or Devlin.” He tapped the earpiece he was wearing. “Hopefully their equipment’s just messing up.”
She exchanged an uneasy glance with Kade.
Jace’s jaw tightened. “Let’s go. We’ll start with the next door down on the other side of the hall.”
He peered out into the hall, then ducked around the corner.
Kade reloaded, then looked at Bailey. “Ready for round two?”
She glanced at the dead Enforcer, picturing Hawke’s face there, and swallowed, hard. “Ready.”
They peered down the hall, left and right, then ran for the next door. The rest of the floor was cleared in just a few minutes. The four of them raced back toward the stairwell, slamming the door open without even pausing.
A gunman was in the stairwell and whir
led around toward them.
Kade slammed his body against the gunman, sending him careening over the railing. Kade winced but pounded down the stairs after Jace and his teammate, with Bailey following behind.
They took up positions on either side of the door, pistols out, backs to the wall. Kade did the countdown, then pulled open the door.
Boom!
Chapter Twenty-three
Friday, 7:13 p.m.
Kade blinked up at the sky above him. A red sky. Solid red everywhere he looked. Wait, that didn’t make sense. His ears were ringing. But other than that, everything was quiet. Jumbled images bumped through his mind. What was the last thing he remembered? The field, leaving Austin there, standing on his new prosthetics. The helicopter. Bailey, looking terrified but doing her best to hide it. She was so damn proud, and competent in so many skills. But deathly afraid of flying, or “landing” as she’d informed him. And of being cremated. Odd things to learn right before they went into battle.
Bailey.
The stairwell, opening the door.
An explosion.
A shout sounded off to his left, tinny, but clear. Another shout sounded from his other side, louder now. His hearing was coming back. Gunshots, footsteps, people running both away from him and toward him.
The door, it had exploded as he’d pulled it open. Everything snapped into place. The red sky was the red metal door. It had taken the brunt of the force, blew him backward, protected him from the blast.
He shoved it to the side, tossing it toward the wall, or where the wall should have been. Lights from the parking lot, dulled by dark smoke, shined through the exterior wall, in a hole large enough to accommodate several men. Which was what it was doing right now. Men were running past him, coughing as the smoke got thicker, carrying guns, shouting, directing others through the debris and out the hole in the wall. Not Faegan’s men, his men, Equalizers. And men he didn’t recognize but that were being helped by the Equalizers. The hostages—they must have found them and were evacuating them from the building.
But where the hell was Bailey?
He shook his head again, trying to clear the buzzing noise, and shoved himself to his feet. Everything ached, like he’d been pulverized with a giant meat tenderizer. His bad leg pounded in rhythm with his pulse.